The Balcony – Catfish and the Bottlemen

Let’s go way back to August 2013, Catfish and the Bottlemen were seen performing on the BBC Introducing stage at Reading and Leeds festival. Almost 2 years on and they’re still growing, playing at numerous festivals in the upcoming weeks, having a sold out UK tour, and apparently also having lots more content which they are planning on releasing in the coming months.

Influenced by the likes of The Beatles and Oasis, Catfish and the Bottlemen are a four piece, fronted by Van McCann, formed in Llandudno in 2007. Their debut album ‘The Balcony’, was released in September 2014, and reached number 10 in the UK charts.

Homesick, their first single was released in 2013. It was written by Van, evidently talking about the strain of being away from his girlfriend whilst he was touring. Then there is ‘Kathleen’, inevitably the bands most popular/well known song, hitting number 11 in the UK Indie Chart. The band also have become close friends with actor Ewan McGregor, he featured in the music video for ‘Hourglass’ another of the 11 songs on this album, it’s one of the slower more acoustic ones. ‘The Balcony’ also consists of other songs such as ’26’, ‘fallout’ and ‘Rango’ which was written about Van trying to win back an ex-girlfriend, are we seeing a trend here? Many of the songs were written when Van was still in his teens. Van has even said many of the songs on the album are ‘from all over the place really’.

The song ‘Kathleen’ uses lyrics such as “I gotta give it to you, you give me problems when you are not in the mood.”, the lyrics in ‘Homesick’ include, “I said, ‘i’m only looking out for you,’ she said, ‘it’s obvious that’s a lie'”. These are all lyrics you can almost hear the large crowds at their concerts singing along with. Catfish and the Bottlemen have evidently written lyrics that an audience will love, and also enable them relate to the mood of which the band are portraying especially when performing them live.

Tyrants is the final song on the album, and they have clearly put their all into this track. Not only is it the last song, but it is also the longest of all 11 tracks on the album at a length of 4 minutes and 41 seconds. It starts off quite slowly and then gets louder with the use of guitars and banging of drums, giving the song a dramatic opening. The song gets increasingly louder and more intense over the duration, until the end when it just completely cuts off. This leaves you wanting more, and I certainly can’t wait to hear more from this band.